AuthorTopic: Legal Reasoning (Read 175949 times)

In his paper, Freud referred to the contagious and regressive nature of groups described by LeBon and McDougall, but he added the dimension of intrapsychic cathectic shifts that could occur in groups. Freud described the similarity of such groups as the Catholic Church and the army with the hypnotic situation. In all of these situations, there is a leader and one or more followers. The follower obeys the leader and gives up his own superego and ego ideal as he identifies with the leader's superego.

Puritans don't work things out with enemies like these because there is no negotiating with the irrational. The Puritan mind reasons: "Well of course the witch doesn't want to be saved from her own evil. That's why we must save her from herself by burning her at the stake." Sounds absurd, but that American major said after the destruction of the village of Ben Tre in Vietnam: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." A true Puritan there. And now look what we're doing in Iraq. Think Fallujah. We're burning the country at the stake. It's a form of mental illness, but it's a sickness we all accept as normal.

Terrorism is the latest encounter of the Puritan mind with the irrational, and the traditional Islamic culture that promotes it will just have to be destroyed to save it. World politics will be so much more hygienic once we exterminate the vermin. I wasn't all that surprized to learn that Tom Delay had been an exterminator before he entered politics. He's the poster child for this tragic illness. Would that Jerry Lewis have a telethon to raise money for its cure.

A key element in understanding the Calvinist mentality is its need for control and its willingness to use whatever level of violence necessary to repress the "irrational" elements in human experience, and the premodern in the Puritan demonology is full of irrational images triggering fears in need of suppression—magic, witches, Catholic ritual, shifty Jews, hot-tempered Italians, voodoo practicing Africans, the savage Indian. J.K. Rowling's "muggles" and their fear of magic is a kind of sendup of this mentality. Theirs is a tight, priggish, white-bread, control-obsessed world, sterilized of anything that suggests mystery, transcendence, or the non-rational in general. The Puritans and their Calvinist cousins the Scotch Irish, of course, didn't invent priggishness, nor are they, obviously, the only ones in the history of humanity who have justified the violent repression of their enemies for religious reasons. But theirs is the peculiarly modern form for the religious persecution of the enemy, and it lingers in Anglo-American culture, and is so much in the cultural air we breathe that we cannot see it clearly. At the very heart of modern "religiosity," whether in its Calvinist or its more secular versions, is fear of the uncontrollable non-rational.

The American right's fear of communism/socialism is more akin to the Islamic fear of modernity, which is the fear of an uncontrollable future. If fascism derives its mystique from a mythological past, communism derives it from a mytholgized future. Progressives look to the future. Conservatives look to the past. Progressives distrust the past and its premodern irrationality; Conservatives distrust those who look to the future with an irrational utopianism. Progressivism is experiencing hard times these days because during a culturally decadent period like the one we're currently suffering through, we don't know what to hope for. We have only the weakest sense of plausible future possibility. We are capable of seeing the future only as a variation on 'more of the same', and that is not a vision that inspires concerted action. That will change someday, but for now it's the conservatives' time because when our imagination of the future is weak, we fall back on the past for want of something better. And we find ourselves voting for mediocrities like George Bush rather than mediocrities like John Kerry for the same reason. The first represents the solidity of the past; the second a fuzzy future for which we can muster little hope.

In America the ideal of humiliating mental torture is much more entranched and frequent and revered. In summer camp, in high schools (read law schools as well), in Boot Camp, in the Skulls and Bones Club at Yale, in the Miss America contest, the spelling bee, Death Row or Oscar Night, in every Hollywood roast or any meeting of AA or any parade ground or football victory lap, ritualized humiliation is the American way.

Logged

"Nonviolence in the sense of mere non-killing does not appeal to me to be any improvement on the technique of violence. It means slow torture and when the slowness becomes ineffective we shall immeadiately revert to killing and to the atom bomb."

This is all nice being able to vent our collective rage at these scumbags. Believe me I struggle against just exploding with disgust at humanity seeing these captains of industry act like satans minions and most people just lamely sucking it up as lazy, weak, lobotomized consumer clowns all caring about no one and no thing except their own ease and convenience. So what I want to know is what are we all going to do about these parasites?

All these fascist pieces of *&^% deserve whatever we can do to them and then some! I fantasize a global revolution somewhat like the French revolution with mobs storming the office towers and mansions of the ruthlessly rich and dragging these shitballs from their obscene cucoons of comfort and burning them or cutting their f**cking evil heads off. You can bet that then unbridled greed and rapacious business practices would not be idolized and worshipped with the same vigor that it is today by our propaganda spewing masters. I can just see people like Dickhead Cheney trying to fit in with the street people dressed in rags.

In America the ideal of humiliating mental torture is much more entranched and frequent and revered. In summer camp, in high schools (read law schools as well), in Boot Camp, in the Skulls and Bones Club at Yale, in the Miss America contest, the spelling bee, Death Row or Oscar Night, in every Hollywood roast or any meeting of AA or any parade ground or football victory lap, ritualized humiliation is the American way.

No wonder, then, why the production and traffic of forged bills is so actively repressed and so heavily punished -- to a far greater extent, for instance, than are theft or embezzlement.

Well, the answer can only lie in this -- that is, the Symbolic, of which money is precisely a representative -- ought to circulate. The very durability of the social cultural system is at stake here, for this system could be overturned or even destroyed by the proliferation of false references that are necessarily excluded from any form of legal and symbolic guarantee.

Forged currency is a parody: it apes, as it were, real currency, and renders this ridiculous in much the same way as an ape imitating a man makes fun of the latter. And as one cannot make fun of symbolic guarantees with impunity, the proliferation of forged currency is anything but neutral: not only economic values but equally ethical and juridical values, etc., soon appear as suspicious since currency is the expression of a global sovereignty.

Such considerations give support to the idea that it is impossible to completely trust the Symbolic, however absolutely indispensable this may otherwise be to Man. It may well be the case that the true bears the false within itself, but, more generally, money is never able to pay for or replace those minute fetishes (trivia, memories, etc.) that are so dear to us and which testify, over the course of our lives, to the absence of the fundamental object of desire (the proof that one cannot buy everything).

Digital cash presents an additional problem. Although payment with forged electronic currency could be construed as an act of theft or fraud, the very act of forging the electronic cash -- for example cracking the computer protections and copying the bits in the wallet on the hard disk -- is prima facie not prohibited by criminal law. A revision of the law is therefore necessary in order to make it clear that forging digital currency is just the same as forging bank notes.

In America the ideal of humiliating mental torture is much more entranched and frequent and revered. In summer camp, in high schools (read law schools as well), in Boot Camp, in the Skulls and Bones Club at Yale, in the Miss America contest, the spelling bee, Death Row or Oscar Night, in every Hollywood roast or any meeting of AA or any parade ground or football victory lap, ritualized humiliation is the American way.

You bet! Here are some military training pics:

I was standing in one of those shops that carry trendy clothes and miscellaneous fad trinkets. Several yards away from me two women were having fun trying on hats. Judging from their clothes and the prominent political buttons each one sported, I reckoned them to be progressive, probably feminists. The amazing part of the picture was the hats they were trying on. Some company had taken surplus military caps and dyed them various earth tone purples and pastel pink. I stood there watching the irony of these women modeling for each other the cap that any man who has been in the military knows as the "female private part Cap."

There must be an unwritten rule that GIs or veterans not use the term "female private part Cap" in the presence of women. Probably 98% of all men who are or were in the U.S. Army know the "female private part Cap" by that name. Probably 98% of the women in America have never even heard of it. The root of this difference is male bonding. This universal camaraderie-among-men starts with "No Girls Allowed" which is nothing more than Woman Hatred 101. The U.S. military concentrates this exclusion of women and uses it as the lowest common demoninator among GIs: "At least we're not girls!" Military authorities need to create a cohesive fighting unit which is completely controllable. To off-set the danger of GIs sticking together against the Brass, they foment divisions like racism within the ranks. On the other hand, male bonding is the distraction used to patch the splits between the troops arising from racial, regional, and cultural differences. By dividing the troops in some ways, and simultaneously uniting them against women, the Brass hope to create reliable fighters completely under their control. Male bonding also keeps the troops in line, for fear of being labeled a "sissy" or "female private part." The label becomes more than a sexist insult, but constitutes exclusion from the group. Much more than momma and apple pie, male bonding and fear of exclusion keeps the troops marching along in lockstep.

Military authorities have an additional motive in promoting woman-hating. Probably 90% of the contact the troops have with the people they are sent to subjugate is with women and children. If soldiers see "enemy" women as sub-human, there's far more likelihood that they will be willing to carry out orders to commit atrocities against them. Not that American GIs have to stray far from the community standards they were raised with to commit atrocities. Authorities on rape often point out that 1 in 4 women in the U.S. will be sexually assaulted during her lifetime. That horrible statistic comes from relatively stable, "normal times" in Amerikkka. Nobody has ever compiled the statistics for the fate of women in other countries when American troops land, but given how the military fosters and gives permission to the worst view of women, the thought boggles the mind.

"At least he'll get some training"

A mother whose son was joining the army was saying "At least he'll be off the streets and will get some training." He'll be trained, all right. He'll learn the name for the "female private part cap" in the first few days. That, of course, is merely a small example of the way that the military takes the sexism every young boy in America gets as part of his "manhood training" and concentrates it and raises it to all-new levels of woman-hating.

Break the code of silence

Veterans can play an important role in going up against all this. We must break the code of silence and expose just how sick military "service" really is. We must break with complicity by refusing to tolerate the rampant sexism that surrounds all of us. The saying "the dust doesn't vanish where the broom doesn't reach" is certainly true here. The popular image of veterans as individuals who have successfully passed all the "manhood" tests makes it absolutely important that we, of all people, take a clear and public stand on the oppression of women. The "female private part Cap" must go! Vets have to decide what legacy we are going to pass along to the next and future generations-to continue marching to the beat of sexism and sexual violence towards women, to uphold those moments in our lives we feel the worst about, or to determinedly fight to bring about a new day. But be forewarned: sexism is one of the big foundation blocks of the empire -- if we bring down the one the other falls too!

In America the ideal of humiliating mental torture is much more entranched and frequent and revered. In summer camp, in high schools (read law schools as well), in Boot Camp, in the Skulls and Bones Club at Yale, in the Miss America contest, the spelling bee, Death Row or Oscar Night, in every Hollywood roast or any meeting of AA or any parade ground or football victory lap, ritualized humiliation is the American way.

No wonder, then, why the production and traffic of forged bills is so actively repressed and so heavily punished -- to a far greater extent, for instance, than are theft or embezzlement.

Well, the answer can only lie in this -- that is, the Symbolic, of which money is precisely a representative -- ought to circulate. The very durability of the social cultural system is at stake here, for this system could be overturned or even destroyed by the proliferation of false references that are necessarily excluded from any form of legal and symbolic guarantee.

Forged currency is a parody: it apes, as it were, real currency, and renders this ridiculous in much the same way as an ape imitating a man makes fun of the latter. And as one cannot make fun of symbolic guarantees with impunity, the proliferation of forged currency is anything but neutral: not only economic values but equally ethical and juridical values, etc., soon appear as suspicious since currency is the expression of a global sovereignty.

Such considerations give support to the idea that it is impossible to completely trust the Symbolic, however absolutely indispensable this may otherwise be to Man. It may well be the case that the true bears the false within itself, but, more generally, money is never able to pay for or replace those minute fetishes (trivia, memories, etc.) that are so dear to us and which testify, over the course of our lives, to the absence of the fundamental object of desire (the proof that one cannot buy everything).

Digital cash presents an additional problem. Although payment with forged electronic currency could be construed as an act of theft or fraud, the very act of forging the electronic cash -- for example cracking the computer protections and copying the bits in the wallet on the hard disk -- is prima facie not prohibited by criminal law. A revision of the law is therefore necessary in order to make it clear that forging digital currency is just the same as forging bank notes.

In America the ideal of humiliating mental torture is much more entranched and frequent and revered. In summer camp, in high schools (read law schools as well), in Boot Camp, in the Skulls and Bones Club at Yale, in the Miss America contest, the spelling bee, Death Row or Oscar Night, in every Hollywood roast or any meeting of AA or any parade ground or football victory lap, ritualized humiliation is the American way.